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Explaining React's license

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Re: Explaining React's license

#301

Post by drieddust »

WalterSear wrote: post #177
drieddust wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and there is no reason to still stick with react when alternatives like vuejs and angular are available. Its not that great anyways when compared to angular 2/4. There are too many concepts to be mastered and it soon become overwhelming. I tried learning react but dropped it after spending a week when I still could not understand routing. Sense of cohesiveness between different concepts is missing. I believe s…

React doesn't do routing. It's a view library. And for me, the opposite was true vis-a-vis Angular and React, though got as far as making contributions to the Angular 2 tools before I decided to jumping ship.

> React doesn't do routing. It's a view library.

and that's the problem. React itself solves a tiny subset and delegates the other responsibilities to different tools which may not align with each other. Most of the is spent is wiring making different choices and wiring them together.

On a side note what made you move away from Angular 2 to React?

Re: Explaining React's license

#302

Post by hardwaresofton »

foota wrote: post #193
hardwaresofton wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this opinion almost swayed me, but the problem is that companies aren't scared of open source writers suing them. If you use project A that was written by one or two developers in their spare time (and they included a BSD+patents) clause, would Facebook fear being sued by them? Probably not -- but new companies that get anywhere close to what Facebook does (increasingly, that's everything these days) definitely li…

I agree this is hypothetical, but an organization could form for enforcing the license.

This is exactly what I don't want it to come to. That's just a corporate arms race, and I can promise you open source is not going to win.

Instead of forming organizations to fight patent wars, just put effort towards fixing the patent problems.

Re: Explaining React's license

#303

Post by drieddust »

rtpg wrote: post #297
drieddust wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and there is no reason to still stick with react when alternatives like vuejs and angular are available. Its not that great anyways when compared to angular 2/4. There are too many concepts to be mastered and it soon become overwhelming. I tried learning react but dropped it after spending a week when I still could not understand routing. Sense of cohesiveness between different concepts is missing. I believe s…

vue and angular don't offer the same typing guarantees as React. Though I use Angular in my day-to-day, I would really love to be in React land for that reason alone. I've had too many interface bugs due to simple template typos

How come? Angular is Typescipt first so typing guarantees are builin.

Re: Explaining React's license

#304

Post by davnicwil »

rakibtg wrote: post #244

This is pathetic and breaks my heart. Expecting something good from thieves is not very practical, Facebook the company started by stealing others dream. This days if you take a look at them, they won't let grow any other app for any cost. They bought instagram, whatsapp where they already was providing such feature but due to their earlybird list. Also instead of contributing few tweaks into NPM they made a clone of…

> One day we are going to have F-git

Funnily enough, their source control is actually a counter example to your assertions here.

Facebook reportedly don't use git but rather mercurial, and seemingly have contributed significantly to that project. See this for example https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...

Note, I don't work at Facebook or have any affiliation or knowledge of how they operate, I'm just taking the contents of this blog post at face value.

Re: Explaining React's license

#305

Post by hardwaresofton »

chrisco255 wrote: post #238
hardwaresofton wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this opinion almost swayed me, but the problem is that companies aren't scared of open source writers suing them. If you use project A that was written by one or two developers in their spare time (and they included a BSD+patents) clause, would Facebook fear being sued by them? Probably not -- but new companies that get anywhere close to what Facebook does (increasingly, that's everything these days) definitely li…

The clause states you only lose the patent rights if YOU sue Facebook for patent infringement (and only for patent infringement, not other reasons). As pointed out by Dennis Walsh in ( https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/react-facebook-and-the-revok... ), it would take millions to bring a patent suit against Facebook.

Yeah, and if Facebook DOES infringe on a patent you own, and it's a valid case? You then have to rewrite your frontend code base as fast as you can?

At it's best this is like some sort of warped "you infringe on my patents and I'll infringe on yours" kind of thing, assuming MAD means it doesn't become a very-uneven suing war. This case is also bad news, because larger companies are much more capable of infringing on your patents and competing with smaller companies in a conglomerate style.

Amazon is a conglomerate. Alphabet/Google is a conglomerate. Somehow, everyone in the government who manages anti-trust (whether that should be a thing is another debate), seems to be asleep at the wheel, literally everyday.

Also, guess who has lots of resources to rebuild a shitty copy of ingenuous software they found online? Big corporations do. All the starry eyed CS grads who want to go work for Big Conglomerate Co. are going to be rearing to re-implement Redis in 50K LOC, but it's harder for some small company (or just random open source project) to re-build the parts of their app that used react in some other framework.

Re: Explaining React's license

#306

Post by nkkollaw »

Can this problem easily be solved by avoiding to sue Facebook?

If I understand the issue correctly, there's a clause in their license that says the license is revoked if you sue them.

How risky is this for regular usage?

Re: Explaining React's license

#307

Post by AgentME »

rakibtg wrote: post #244

This is pathetic and breaks my heart. Expecting something good from thieves is not very practical, Facebook the company started by stealing others dream. This days if you take a look at them, they won't let grow any other app for any cost. They bought instagram, whatsapp where they already was providing such feature but due to their earlybird list. Also instead of contributing few tweaks into NPM they made a clone of…

>Also instead of contributing few tweaks into NPM they made a clone of NPM called Yarn, so funny.

npm is buggy and seems to need a lot more than a few tweaks. Some time before Yarn came out I was wondering why no one had yet decided to make a direct competitor / rewrite npm from scratch.

Re: Explaining React's license

#308

Post by rafinha »

rakibtg wrote: post #244

This is pathetic and breaks my heart. Expecting something good from thieves is not very practical, Facebook the company started by stealing others dream. This days if you take a look at them, they won't let grow any other app for any cost. They bought instagram, whatsapp where they already was providing such feature but due to their earlybird list. Also instead of contributing few tweaks into NPM they made a clone of…

Caffe and Caffe2 is also a good example!

Re: Explaining React's license

#309

Post by erokar »

drieddust wrote: post #303
rtpg wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vue and angular don't offer the same typing guarantees as React. Though I use Angular in my day-to-day, I would really love to be in React land for that reason alone. I've had too many interface bugs due to simple template typos

How come? Angular is Typescipt first so typing guarantees are builin.

Not in templates.

Re: Explaining React's license

#310

Post by hobofan »

sanxiyn wrote: post #272
Scaevolus wrote: post #220

Almost all of Facebook's "open source" code has the same PATENTS file, which makes them toxic if you can imagine a future where Facebook infringes one of your patents: https://github.com/search?p=5&q=org%3Afacebook+filename%3APA... This includes things far outside the React ecosystem: - Flow (JS type checker, like TypeScript) - prepack (JS optimizing transpiler) - a bunch of Android/iOS UI/debugging frameworks, - all…

I am very happy to report that ZSTD removed PATENTS clause: https://github.com/facebook/zstd/pull/801

RocksDB too.

That really makes it seem like Facebooks stance is: "As long as we have a few really huge projects that infiltrate most companies' codebases, our 'smaller' projects can drop the patent clause".

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